Cue Sad Trombone.
Hormuz Closure has countries all over the world bailing on LNG plans.
Also, they’ve realized that the US is no longer a reliable partner, having seen the treacherous, double dealing, and dishonorable way we’ve been threatening, bullying and double crossing our closest allies.
No one wants any part of that. So that cabinet seat that Secretary of Energy and Fracking grifter Chris Wright paid a million dollars for is becoming less valuable every day.
Laughed so damn hard reading this.
U.S. energy firms investing billions of dollars in hulking liquefied natural gas export terminals along the Gulf Coast have capitalized on an insatiable appetite for the fuel from Europe and fast-growing economies in Asia.
Now, the conflict in Iran has many of those customers vowing to go on a permanent diet.
As Asia and Europe grapple with the energy disruption created by the war, countries there are scrambling to pivot away from imported fuels, throwing a wrench into the expansion plans of American energy companies and fossil fuels’ long-term outlook.
In countries where the power crunch is so dire that workweeks have been shortened, factories are closing and government rationing has been imposed, leaders are looking beyond just diversifying where they buy fuel to changing what fuels they use. Governments from Manila to Hanoi are leaning into alternatives that range from expanding coal power to endeavoring to build fleets of nuclear plants to increasing their fleets of electric vehicles, all in pursuit of cutting their foreign imports.
“The world has just been traumatized by the geopolitical risk of oil and gas,” said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It creates renewed momentum for countries to try to electrify what they can and reduce gas demand to the extent possible.”
At the moment, nations are scrambling to replace the fuel deliveries disrupted by the war, giving a boost to suppliers in the U.S. and Australia in particular. But the long-term outlook for the fossil fuel industry has become more uncertain.
The research firm Wood MacKenzie wrote in a report this week that if the disruption persists, it “could accelerate a structural shift in global energy systems,” leading countries to cut their consumption of imported oil and gas to half of current levels by 2050 — a steep drop compared with the firm’s prewar “baseline” forecast. The report notes that such a shift would do little to slow climate change, as it includes an expansion of planet-warming coal generation.
(note: the other day I posted some evidence that this might not be the case – Peter)
he ceasefire the United States and Iran announced this week is unlikely to ease the anxieties of Asian and European countries that have been rattled by the energy crunch. Even if a lasting peace deal is reached, supply chains have been badly damaged and risks of future disruptions remain acute. Fuel deliveries will be constrained for months to come, even under the most rosy scenarios.
That has left nations determined to insulate themselves from future military conflicts or countries that wield their exports as an economic weapon, like the United States.
For American producers, the timing is awkward.
While existing LNG export terminals are running near full capacity, largely insulated by long-term contracts, the next wave of projects depends heavily on demand growth in precisely the countries that are reconsidering their commitment.
In some cases, Asian governments are intervening directly, forcing reductions in energy use to preserve limited supplies, and working to fast-track clean energy projects.
In the Philippines, officials are rushing to bring more than a gigawatt of solar capacity online within weeks while advancing a massive solar-and-battery installation designed to reduce reliance on gas-fired power. Vietnam has signed a deal to develop a new nuclear power plant, reviving a program it had abandoned years ago, while expanding offshore wind. Indonesia is accelerating a major hydropower project to power its industrial sector. It is also exploring small modular nuclear reactors as an alternative to gas plants.
Individually, none of these moves would be enough to displace large volumes of imported energy. Taken together, they point to a broader shift that could erode one of the central assumptions underpinning fossil fuel export growth by the U.S. and other oil- and gas-rich nations.
“It is unequivocally clear that the sales pitch for LNG as a reliable, affordable fuel is quickly evaporating” said Sam Reynolds, a research lead at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “The rug has been pulled out completely from under the industry narrative.”
Jigar Shah on Open Circuit Podcast, March 13, 2026:
I don’t think they really understand that the amount of money that you have to spend to switch from coal to natural gas is really backbreaking amounts of money. It is not something that anyone should do lightly. It’s a 50-year investment. It is now telling everybody to skip that step, right? And so all of these countries from China to the 50 oil importing countries are saying, wait, we don’t actually want to use natural gas. We’ll use it at the port, right? So we have an LNG import terminal, we’ll import LNG there, we’ll have a power plant there and we’ll maybe even put our industry there, right? But we’re no longer going to build out thousands of miles of natural gas pipelines to be able to switch people to natural gas in country, right? Because it’s so expensive.
And if you’re going to have this kind of supply disruption and the US just doesn’t care about protecting any of these shipping lanes, then why would we do that when it’s actually expensive, right? The landed cost of LNG is not cheap and we could just skip all the way to solar and battery storage, and the Chinese are obviously exporting that stuff to those 50 countries. And so I do think that this is going to hurt the entire story around the coal to LNG switch.